


Brighter

by pprfaith



Series: Yellow Car [2]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M, Neverland, Pre-Series, There are Actually Almost no Warnings for This, Underage Emma, what is WRONG with me?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-03
Updated: 2013-04-03
Packaged: 2017-12-07 09:33:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/746979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the end of it, Emma carries a star around her neck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brighter

+

Emma is running out of time. 

She gives her watch an impatient look, bites the inside of her cheek and looks around. She doesn’t exactly blend with this crowd, which is why she’s been hesitating. It’s summer. She should have gone with ballet flats instead of combat boots. But she might need to run.

And now she’s only got ten minutes left and damn it, it’s not like this is her first time.

So, with a deep breath, she plunges.

She slips around a woman in a five hundred dollar dress, knocks into her from behind and helps her catch her purse before it goes flying. She apologizes profusely and keeps moving without a backward glance.

Past a gaggle of kids, brushing up against a businessman and then another.

A tourist couple taking photos of each other. She offers, smiles at them a lot and crowds into them to show them the pictures.

A couple of women out for a late lunch and, finally, a stuck up rich kid eyeing her from across the street.

She slams into the passenger seat of the bug with thirty seconds to spare and grins at Killian, who leans across the car to kiss her, hot and sloppy, grinning all the time.

“Six,” she announces, nipping at his lower lip.

He pouts for a moment and then starts sniggering. “Seven!”

She punches him in the shoulder and orders, “Let’s get outta here.”

+

He wins in number, she wins in cash. Her six wallets add up to something close to a thousand dollars in cash. His, all taken from women, only make six hundred. 

They wipe them all down with alcoholic wet wipes – another trick she had to teach him – and throw them in the nearest mailbox.

“Tonight,” he announces, “we’re dining like royalty.”

+

He makes her put on a dress and leave off the tights. She feels naked and he smirks at her and says, “You’re beautiful. And also easier to undress.”

Killian puts on a dress shirt she stole for him and then drives them all the way across town to a restaurant that costs more than money than they usually spend on a week of food. He cons them into a table, sits her down, wines her, dines her and makes her laugh all the while.

He never says the words, but she knows anyway.

“How’d you know?” she finally bursts out between bites of the best chocolate cake of her life.

His hand disappears under the table briefly and comes back up with her battered wallet in hand. Inside is a piece of paper, taped to the flap and written in neat, childish copperplate.

It has her name, birthday, and a long outdated address on it. She groans. “I was ten when I wrote that.”

“And now you’re seventeen. Congratulations, love.”

He says it too loudly and the other patrons, all older, richer, better dressed, give him mildly horrified looks. Yeah, he’s a perv. She rolls her eyes. As if age is about the physical. She’d bet a limb that she’s seen more, done more in seventeen years than most of those people in twice that much time. 

So she finishes her wine in one big gulp and waves down the waiter. “Are we going somewhere?” he asks and she nods.

“Out of here,” she answers.

“Why’s that?”

She shrugs and says, louder than strictly necessary, “I don’t feel like being judged on my birthday.” And then she gives her sweetest smile to an elderly woman in an evening gown and stands to go.

He grabs her by the hand, stops her, pulls her into his side and slings his left arm across her shoulders. The hook flashes like a deadly accessory. 

And just like that, Emma stands tall again and they walk out the way they came: Like royalty.

“We’re bad,” she announces as soon as the cool night air slaps into their faces.

He hooks into her belt, turns her around and gives her an earnest look. “No, love. We’re _good_.”

+

“Can you take it off?” she asks, fingers running up the leather harness that keeps his hook in place. As far as she’s seen, he never takes it off, unless it’s to shower. 

Tonight, she kind of wants to see him without it. All of him, as cheesy as it sounds. 

He looks at her, just looks, for a long time. Silently asking if she knows what she’s asking. She does.

She does and that’s why she waits, her dress bunched around her waist, her neat hair all undone, sitting on the edge of the bed, not moving a muscle. 

In the end, he sighs, shakes his head. “The things you do to me, lass.” 

He unbuckles the harness, drops it and waits. She gives him a soft smile and then lets her gaze travel downward. The stump isn’t pretty, but she didn’t expect anything else. 

She holds out her hand and he takes it, lets himself be drawn in.

“Why?” she asks pressing her forehead against his.

“Why what?”

Why do you take off your armor for me, why do you let me see, why do you stay, why _are you here_?

“Why me?”

The sound he makes is a little like laughing and a little like crying and he pushes her backward and kneels with his legs on either side of her. 

“You,” he says, low and laughing, but not really amused. Dangerous, is the word, she thinks, but isn’t scared. “You, Emma Swan. You weren’t part of the plan at all. I came here for one thing: Revenge. Revenge on the one that took everything from me. I came here plotting to kill him and all that stands in my path. And then there you were and I…”

He bows his head and exhales into her shoulder. Then he rolls onto his cheek and speaks into her jaw. “I don’t know. I don’t know why you, or why I stay, why I… I don’t know, love. Haven’t got the faintest.”

He snorts and she finally moves, wraps her arms around him and pulls him closer until he’s just lying on top of her, heavy, smothering and real. 

Emma has known from the first day on that there’s something wicked in him, something dark and dangerous. Deadly. You don’t wear a weapon as an extension of your body without meaning to use it.

But whatever he meant to do, whoever he meant to kill, whyever he’s so strangely lost in the world, he’s here now.

He’s here now and he bothered to find out her birthday and he took her out and wined and dined her like a queen for no other reason than that he wanted to.

So she wraps herself around him and lets him be. Lets him grieve whatever he needs to grieve, even though his eyes stay dry.

“Will you tell me?” she asks, later, when everything’s gone soft around the edges with almost-sleep and her birthday is long over. “One day, I mean.”

He finally moves, looking up at her with his old-young blue eyes. “Yes,” he says without hesitation. “But not yet.”

They fall asleep like that, no sex, no romance, not even blankets, and it’s still the best birthday Emma Swan has ever had.

Because it’s the first one she gets to spend with someone who actually wants to be there with her.

+

“So, when’s your birthday?”

He shrugs half-heartedly and looks past her. It’s something he does when he doesn’t want to lie to her.

They read each other far too well for that, though, so she just sighs. “Not yet?”

It’s been two weeks since her birthday and they’ve been picking pockets and sneaking into motels, sleeping in the car sometimes and generally spending every second of every day together. 

And the more questions Emma asks, the more he looks past her and away. 

She pushes away from the wall she was sitting on, presses a kiss to his forehead and announces, “I’m getting us lunch.”

+

(He wants to tell her.

That’s the most surprising part about all this.

She’s young and breakable and lonely and when she looks at him with her eyeglasses askew and calls him by his first name like it’s an accident, he wants to… _keep_ her. 

Her fire, her strength, her vulnerability. He wants to wrap it all up inside her frame and hold it there, protect it.

“I love you,” she tells him one night, insecurity creeping in in the darkness. “I know I’m just….”

She never finishes, but he wants to rip out the spines of everyone that ever hurt her, anyway.

He hasn’t wanted to protect anything since Milah.

He didn’t think he remembered how.)

+

“Killian?”

She frowns, still mostly asleep, but waking up quickly. A moment later she’s sitting up straight and grabbing for her discarded clothes. He stills her hands, shakes his head.

“There was a Crocodile,” he starts and she blinks against his silhouette, backlit by the streetlights beyond the window. He’s rushing his words like a child forcing himself to talk and she fights the sudden impulse to launch herself at him and hold his mouth shut. 

Stop the words. 

But they’ve been hanging right here for weeks, in this place, halfway between truth and silence and Emma is… terrified. 

So terrified that, come morning, she’ll be alone again. 

“He was Milah’s husband. But she didn’t love him and she begged me, Emma, she begged me to take her away.”

And then it all comes pouring out, magic and ships and monsters and magic, pirates and Neverland and Lost Boys and she should be thinking about the man she loves is insane, but the only thing going through her mind is, _oh_.

“You can tell I’m not lying, love. You can tell.” He reaches out for her with both hands, stops, withdraws first the hook and then the flesh hand.

She chases both, grasps them tightly. “I can tell that you’re telling what you believe is true,” she corrects, gently.

He quirks a grin at her, resignedly. “Aye. There is that.”

She squeezes tightly and waits, because what else is she going to do? He’s the only thing she has. Even if he’s insane, even if he’s… she doesn’t think it matters. Doesn’t think she _can_ ….

After a long minute, he tugs his hand back and starts unscrewing his hook. It comes loose with a click and he twists the bottom end until something comes loose. Pirate, she thinks with a giggle. Of course he has a hidden compartment in his hook. 

After all, he’s _Captain Hook_. 

Her boyfriend if Captain Hook. Either that, or he’s clinically insane that just…she realizes, then, that she doesn’t actually _not_ believe him, because he can’t use a TV and he gets confused by indoor plumbing and the simplest words and expressions fly right over his head.

She doesn’t not believe him.

He shakes that something into his palm and with a wry smile, presents it to her with a flourish she always thought he learned from old movies – except for the thing where he can’t even turn on a TV. The expression doesn’t match his stance though, weary and hopeless and open, for once, so open. She doesn’t like what she reads there because it’s _hurt_. Fragile. “Milady.”

He opens his hand.

The light almost blinds her.

“What…? What is that?” she squints around the glare and makes out something that looks like a stone, a diamond maybe, only it _shines_ , brighter than the sun. 

Killian laughs, a sudden, loud bark of relief. “You can see it! Oh, Emma, you can see it!”

“Killian?” 

“This?” he asks, abruptly, loudly. Happily. “This is a star, love. The one thing I brought here from Neverland. You shouldn’t even be able to see it. You’re not a child and you shouldn’t have magic, but I thought,” he smiles at her, “You shine, did you know that, Emma Swan? You shine. Brighter than the stars of Neverland.”

“I… what? I don’t understand.”

“You have magic, love. That’s why this star shines for you. If you show it to anyone else in this blasted place, they’ll see nothing but a stone. But I somehow managed to find the one person in this entire realm that possesses magic. I found the one person who shines even brighter than this.”

With that he pours the star – _starlight_ – into her cupped hands and it glows, impossibly, even brighter.

+

“You know,” Emma mumbles, her face an inch from his, mostly asleep again and still here, still with him, still _home_ , because that’s what he is and nothing else matters. He loves her. And she loves him. 

“I used to dream that Peter Pan would come and take me away. Just… away from all it. The foster homes, the bad places, the yelling, the loneliness. I dreamed that I’d become one of the Lost Boys and never grow up. Now… I guess it’s a good thing he never came for me. If he had, I might never have met you. I missed Peter Pan and fell in love with Captain Hook.”

She runs her fingers through the hair at his temple. “My life is ridiculous.”

And then, as she softly drifts into sleep, she swears she can hear him whisper. “I would have come for you. If I’d still been that boy, I would have come for you, Emma Swan.”

“No’ you,” she mumbles, burrowing into the crook of his neck. “P’tr P’n.”

She falls asleep with his chuckle rumbling in her ear.

+

A week later he comes back from a little side trip with the star in a silver setting, dangling from a fragile looking length of chain that he loops around her neck and fastens with hand and teeth.

He tugs at it until it sits perfectly against the skin of her chest and, abruptly, the color dims to a calm, humming glow. Almost like the star is settling in to stay.

He folds his hand over it, hook slipping into the pocket of her jeans. She folds her own hands over his and leans into his chest.

“Tell me about magic,” she says.

+

+


End file.
